The Love Children (16 page)

Neither of us heard from him again. He vanished out of our lives. People said that the family had sold their house and that Mrs. Connolly and the younger boys lived in an apartment outside Boston and that she had a job working in a school cafeteria. We didn't know if this was true. By the end of the summer, Mr. Connolly was in jail. He had pleaded no contest and been sentenced to five years in a minimum security prison. It was horrible to picture cheerful Mr. Connolly in jail. It was horrible to
picture poor overworked Mrs. Connolly with her worried forehead, standing all day behind a steam table ladling food onto plates, then going home to her many sons in a cramped apartment.

Then we heard that Patrick, the second-oldest son, had been killed in Vietnam.

My heart hurt thinking about all of them, remembering how, when our gang would pile into their house, they always welcomed us with smiles. They'd urge us to have a Coke, a beer, some peanuts. They were a golden family, full of well-being, affection, and generosity. It was the Connollys I thought of when I read
War and Peace
and came to the Rostovs. It was the Connollys who had strengthened my belief that if people lived the right way, they could have happiness and good luck all their days.

Now suddenly, I couldn't offer to help, couldn't find them to tell them I was sorry about what happened to them. Sandy and I clung to each other, telephoning each other and writing every week, but after a few months we forgot it, or I did, being the fickle thing I am.

I loved college
, everything about it: the beauty of the Green Mountains, the freedom of living without a mother or father around, the thrilling new people I met who shimmered with the glamour of the unknown. Above all I loved what I was learning. I encountered books by authors I hadn't known existed—they weren't from long ago, like Austen or Trollope or Henry James, or new, like Lessing and Solzhenitsyn, but in between—I read Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at Noon
and André Malraux's
Man's Fate
. They were about recent times, times when I was alive yet knew nothing about. They opened up whole new worlds to me. They put the Vietnam War in a new context and made me realize how innocent—ignorant, really—my protesting had been. I was still against war after reading those books, but not as I had been. Somebody had to fight against the horrors described in these books, just like my father had said. Even my mother agreed that Hitler had to be defeated. It had never occurred to me that some wars were, if not good, necessary, and some were not. I was fundamentally against war itself, against humans trying to dominate other humans, but after I read these writers, the problem seemed more complicated.

Freshmen couldn't take creative writing courses, but I joined the poetry club. I never got up the nerve to read anything of my own aloud, but my juices flowed with the stimulus of being there,
and I was writing poems at a hectic pace. Different kids showed up there each week, but the core of it was five girls (including me) and three guys, one named Christopher Hurley. The guys were snobs, mocking almost everybody. They looked down on the girls, which made me nervous. But they were all really nice to me for some reason. I especially liked Christopher. He was older than me, a junior, and he wrote poems about science, culling it for metaphors, especially about time and space. To me he seemed profound. I knew the concept: time and space were a continuum, two ways of looking at the same phenomenon. I wasn't sure I really understood it, but I loved to listen to him read and I tried to talk to him when we all went out for drinks together after the meeting. He didn't seem to particularly notice me. Still, I believed he liked me without knowing it. He was very serious.

I had a terrific lit teacher, Dr. Ruth Stauffer, a dynamic woman around Mom's age and, like Mom, good looking and with a nice figure and nice clothes; she wore pants to class. There weren't many women on the faculty, and the few there were wore skirts. I wore jeans; everybody did, with boots and sweaters. That was our uniform. Ruth (she told us to call her Ruth) had us read Christina Stead's
The Man Who Loved Children
, Günter Grass's
The Tin Drum,
and Christa Wolf's
The Quest for Christa T.,
which knocked me out. We read Lessing's
TheFour-Gated City
, which was great, and then
In Pursuit of the English
, which was a hoot. We had such lively discussions in lit class that we groaned when the class bell rang, and we often hung around afterward.

Ruth started “Fridays at Four,” an informal gathering for us to discuss books or anything else we wanted to talk about. She invited faculty members and students to come and talk about their favorite writer or poet or artist or whatever else they were interested in. Professors who were boring in class came alive when they started to talk about their passions. There was a biology professor who loved Gerard Manley Hopkins and read his
poetry to us in a velvety voice. A math professor came with slides of the beautiful little boxes by Joseph Cornell. A French professor who loved George Sand but never got to teach her talked for over an hour one afternoon and kept us all rapt. He told us about Sand's involvement in the 1848 French Revolution and how she left her husband and went to Paris and dressed as a man so she could go to the theater and feel free in the streets. She took lots of lovers, among them Chopin and Alfred de Musset. We learned that her writing influenced all of Europe and America, inspiring Marx, Bakunin, Dostoevsky, Walt Whitman, Balzac, and Flaubert. She was the first author to write about poor people. The professor read from a novel about the poor,
Francois le Champi, The Country Waif
in English. I was so excited by Sand that I ran to the bookstore to get all her books. But they didn't have any—not one. There were two in the library; I read them both.

Afternoons like that were inspiring, and I felt that this was what college was supposed to be. After lectures, Ruth served sherry and cheese, which made us feel grown up and civilized. The glasses were tiny and there were as many faculty as students, so no one drank too much.

I also took political science, a survey of different forms and theories of government. Unfortunately the teacher was boring, and my mind would drift to Bishop, who had intended to major in poli sci. It was an early class, nine a.m., so I often cut. Nobody took attendance at Andrews, so it didn't matter. I wondered if Bishop liked Yale; I wondered if he felt comfortable there and if he was taking the same poli sci course as I was. I would have liked to write him long letters about it, to ask what he thought about these theories of government. I did start a letter to him, writing three or four pages, but lost it before I could mail it.

During my freshman year, I fell in love every couple of weeks. My attitude toward sex was evolving, and I decided that I had to get over my hesitations and just do it. A number of guys were
pursuing me; the most ardent and indefatigable was Donny Karl. He looked somewhat depraved; he had a thin face with sunken cheeks and cold eyes that I imagined glittered with desire. He looked so sophisticated that I thought he must know all about love. I wasn't crazy about him, but his wicked appearance and his infatuation with me seemed enough. I warned my roommates what was coming and, one rainy Saturday afternoon, locked both my doors and went to bed with him. Afterward, I was shocked: this was the great thing everybody panted for?

When I told Patsy it was a big nothing, she said that if I was disappointed, Donny hadn't known what he was doing. I denied I was disappointed; I insisted I was just not impressed. But her words stayed in my mind, and I started to review Donny's acts and realized he had been sort of clumsy and stupid. Maybe his looks were deceiving?

She had said, “You know what an orgasm is, don't you? You masturbate, right?”

I said, “Sure.” But masturbate! Certainly not! What an idea! Not that I hadn't done a little exploration of my body. But whenever I began to feel something ripple through my flesh, when my heartbeat speeded up and my loins began to throb, I pulled back, because I felt I was doing something bad. But what Patsy said made me think about this and the next time it happened, I let my hands continue their activity, and even exercised some ingenuity, and before long,
Whammo
!

So that's what it was all about.

I abandoned Donny and looked for partners I felt more about, not that there's really any way to be sure sex will be good with anybody. I just thought it would be better if I felt something for the guy, which hadn't been the case with poor Donny. At eighteen, though, I seemed to feel things for an awful lot of guys, and I couldn't tell which feelings mattered and which didn't. Everybody was attractive! I wondered if there was something wrong
with me. Maybe I was oversexed? I was crazy about some girls too. It was common at Andrews for girls to get together with each other. It had cachet—a girl could be a lesbian one year and straight the next. It wasn't as acceptable for boys. My fickle heart sent me roaming, never settling anywhere for long.

 

Toward the end of the spring term, Dad called and said he'd come and get me and lug me and my stuff to Cambridge. That was so thoughtful, so unusual for him, that I felt almost teary, but I just said casually, “Sure, okay.” We set a day and time, and there he was, bright and early on a Friday at the end of May. He had his truck, which held all my stuff easily. It was amazing how much stuff I had—almost twice as much as I'd come up with. I didn't think I'd bought much over the year, some books, a couple of lipsticks, that's all, I thought, but I'd gotten a new stereo for Christmas and a lot of clothes and books, tons of books. He packed all the stuff up and I got in the cab with him and we drove off. After we'd been on the road for what seemed like ages, I was pretty hungry, but he was driving with grim intensity and I didn't dare to suggest stopping. Finally, as we approached Marlboro, he pulled into the driveway of a little restaurant. “Want some lunch?”

“Yeah!” I said fervently.

We got out. Dad stretched and we went in. They knew him in this place. He liked to be known and greeted; it put him in a good mood. That put me in a good mood. We both had huge hamburgers topped with sliced raw onion on a delicious bun. I had a cola and Dad had two Manhattans. That worried me, but he did have coffee after lunch. Still, I was leery of driving with him, but he drove calmly as we left, seeming not to be in a hurry. He pulled into a place—it looked like a car dealership—and I wondered if he was having trouble with the truck.

“Out,” he ordered. I shrugged and obeyed. We walked into the dealer's office.

“Mr. Leighton!” a booming voice welcomed him.

“Harry!” he boomed back.

They chatted like old friends. I just stood there until Dad turned to me. “And this is my daughter, Jessamin.”

Harry turned on me what he probably thought of as his charm. It felt like a blast of heat. He turned away and we followed him out the side door, and he said something to a boy in a grease-stained uniform, who ran off. He and Dad went on blustering to each other, while I stood there trying to figure out if my father had gone completely over the edge, or what was happening. Pretty soon, a little red Fiat convertible pulled up in front of us.

“There she is,” Harry boomed cheerfully.

“Cute as a bug,” my father grinned. He looked at me. “Get in, Jess. It's yours.”

That day glows in my mind still. They say money can't buy happiness, and it's true that after a few years the car didn't affect my spirits at all, but that day and for a long time afterward, I floated in joy. Daddy said he'd bought it because it was a pain in the neck to drive all the way up to Andrews to get me and then drive me back again whenever I visited him. But I'd only visited him once the whole year and I wondered why he had to spoil his generosity by being mean. He told Harry what I'd heard him say to other men, that I was a drag on him, costing him money and time, especially my college education; maybe that's how he felt, but then why was there always a tinge of pride in his voice when he said it? And why was he always laughing while he said it? And they would nod their heads and laugh too. Were his jokes a cover-up for affection for me that he was, for some reason, ashamed of? Was it not manly to love your daughter? My father's sense of things often seemed to me to reflect an upside-down world.

He ordered me to follow him on the highway, but sometimes he'd get behind me as we drove together the rest of the way to
Cambridge. We arrived late in the afternoon; Mom was there but not Philo—I'd called to warn her that Daddy was bringing me home. He took her out to see the car, and as he preened, she seized up with worry. “It's so tiny!” I heard her whisper to him. “If she has an accident, Pat, she's dead.”

“She won't,” he said.

She didn't ask him to stay to dinner, which I thought was mean, since he'd been so kind all day, and he was surely tired, especially after those Manhattans, and now he would have to drive all the way back to Marlboro. I was appalled at her unkindness, until I realized that if he stayed, he'd have got drunk and maybe become abusive; he'd have wanted to stay the night and she'd have had to let him, drunk as he was. So maybe she was right. Still, it seemed sad that my mother could not even manage to be a decent human being for my father. Or he for her, I guess. I clung to him before he left: he'd been so nice to me, he'd never been so nice, and I had a terrible premonition that I'd never see him again. I begged him to call me when he got home and he promised he would, but I waited up late and he didn't. I didn't dare call Julie too late at night, so I called the next day and she said he'd come in at two in the morning, sloshed but in a good mood. So that was okay.

 

I got good grades my first year, all A's, even in political science. My mother was pleased, and I guess I was too, but down deep, I didn't care. What would good grades do for me? I wasn't planning to go to graduate school. I was in college to learn about life; that was what mattered. I thought about Aristotle and his pupils, wandering around Athens talking and arguing without ever even having heard of grades or degrees or a curriculum, just learning to think.